E. Fuller Torrey - Criticism

Criticism

Torrey has criticized many organizations. He has charged the National Institute of Mental Health with not concentrating its resources sufficiently on severe mental illness and directly applicable research; NIMH has disputed his statistics and viewpoint.

Torrey has been charged with acting to limit the voice of those consumers, survivors and ex-patients that he disagrees with, opposing their civil rights and censoring and ridiculing their ideas and those of their supporters. Torrey has been a long-time critic of the Center for Mental Health Services that provides support and advocacy, on the grounds that they support antipsychiatry groups and those opposed to outpatient commitment, claiming they neglect the seriously mentally ill due to a hippie 60s attitude, distributing funds on the basis of other factors such as "community cohesion" and ethnic minority involvement, and being more dysfunctional than the individuals it is supposed to help. He has specifically opposed public funding for the National Empowerment Center, for rejecting the medical model and arguing for a recovery model without necessarily needing medication; it has since lost its funding from the CMHS. Torrey has in general been instrumental in lobbying against, and undermining, community-based consumer projects because they promoted social and experiential recovery and questioned the standard medical model. Consumer organizations have protested that they are already economically disadvantaged and vulnerable to political whim while Torrey and his organizations have rich and powerful backers. It has been argued that Torrey and other psychiatric and family member advocates do not necessarily have the same interests as consumers/survivors themselves. Differences in ideology sharpened after the development of NAMI. In criticizing the New freedom commission on mental health for not recommending forced outpatient medicating, Torrey claimed that stigma against people with mental disorders was largely due to them committing violent acts due to not taking medication, and called the recovery model harmful for sending a cruel message of hope, or implicit blame, to those he believes cannot engage in a recovery process, despite being a laudable long-term vision for the Commission. Torrey hopes to live long enough to see vaccines to prevent many or most cases of schizophrenia.

Although Torrey described family members as "surviving schizophrenia" in his book of that title, in 1997 he said the term "psychiatric survivor" used by ex-patients to describe themselves was just political correctness and he blamed them, along with civil rights lawyers, for the deaths of half a million people due to suicides and deaths on the street. His comments elicited a record number of letters in response, some in favour of Torrey but most against. The accusations have been described as inflammatory and completely unsubstantiated, and issues of self-determination and self-identity said to be more complex than Torrey realizes. In the same journal in 1999, Torrey and Miller of the Stanley Foundation Research Program argued for an incentivised schizophrenia treatment system backed by a credible threat of force, modelled on that used for the fatal infectious disease Tuberculosis; replies criticized the logic of the analogy and resort to forced drugging rather than developing alliances and understanding, to which Torrey accused the director and members of MindFreedom International of living off federal funds while denying illness and not caring about the mentally ill on the streets and in prisons.

Torrey has been a vocal critic of the failures of deinstitutionalization and inadequate community mental health services. He has generally linked this to issues of violence, homelessness and medication noncompliance, as well as lack of proper focus by the relevant governmental organizations. He has been accused of gaining influence by sensationalizing and exaggerating the incidence of violence and its link to medication noncompliance, including disseminating unsubstantiated and unreliable statistics. When a California NAMI journal editor included a questioning of Torrey's statistics, the local board glued together the pages and effectively shut down the journal. Others, while agreeing that public mental health care in the U.S. falls far short of what people with serious psychiatric disorders need and deserve, have argued that Torrey's solutions are outdated and that his book The Insanity Offense is based on unsubtantiated portrayals of certainty on the statistics on violence, outpatient commitment and medication, stigmatizing tens of thousands of people, deeply offending and insulting those who hold views differing from his own, and promulgating one-dimensional solutions. TAC's attempts to associate violent incidents in the news with lack of medication have been described as wild hyperbole, and the use of the term "assisted treatment" has been described as a euphemism for forced drugging.

Philip Dawdy has challenged it. He wrote "You might even ask him why his group cites violence done by people not taking medications, but ignores violent acts committed by people who were on medications and why so many of the studies the group cites are decades old"

and California Network of Mental Health Clients (CNMHC) has challenged it. "Contrary to Treatment Advocacy Center's explicit claims, the study makes no mention of "untreated" mental illness, schizophrenia, manic depression, or any other diagnosis. Equally, there is no basis for extrapolating the 4.3% of the national population. TAC arbitrarily raised DOJ's homicide estimate from 4.3% to 5%. Then they arbitrarily attributed these homicides to less than 1% of the U.S. population, the number TAC says have "untreated schizophrenia and manic-depression."

In another error: 4.3% of 16,914 (the total homicides in 1998) is 727, not 1,000 as TAC claims. And DOJ's predictions for 1999 will lower the figure still further to 645."

Torrey has been criticized by, and has criticized, Thomas Szasz, a libertarian psychiatrist and author of The Myth of Mental Illness who is opposed to involuntary treatment. Torrey has said he admires Szasz for his outspoken criticisms of many psychiatric practices, including "diagnostic creep" (disease mongering) and the potential for the political abuse of psychiatric labels, but that when it comes to Szasz not seeing schizophrenia as a disease of the brain exactly like Parkinson's and Multiple Sclerosis then he is one of his most vocal critics.